Ideas of the home have been explored in contemporary art — tied to issues of race and gender, identity and class. The ‘home is where the heart is’ theme is an abundant notion with many myriad approaches in contemporary art. In Emma Prempeh’s paintings, homes and interiors are imbued with locale, history, memory and identity.
Sunday, 2023 Oil, Acrylic, Schlag metal, Iron Power and Polyester on Canvas. Image courtesy of Emma Prempeh.
To think of Pempeh’s notion of home is to consider it concerning the greater political structures and economies that it is part of. Prempeh is concerned with showing interiors which are familiar to a particular group of people, in this case, black-British immigrants with Caribbean heritage. Of Ghanaian and Vincentian descent, the artist paints her home in the language of Caribbean domestic life — its interiors, moods, and the materiality of the home, the layout and technology, are cultural and historical markers which cultural insiders, people who share these spaces, will recognise.
Weaving, 2023 Oil, Acrylic, Schlag metal on Canvas, 155 x 155 cm. Image courtesy of Emma Prempeh.
In paintings such as Weaving and Sunday the boundaries of canvases are expanded through objects such as lace curtains and fold-out chairs. Pempehe’s interiors are well-worn, lived-in spaces. The patterns, objects and atmosphere of the paintings, the cultural markers and aesthetics all combine to illuminate her British Caribbean upbringing. When her frames aren’t showing idiosyncratic decor found in black homes, her scenes are filled with the people and pets that make houses homes. Her paintings focus on the things—living and inert—that make a home. These paintings have been shaped by the Caribbean migration and reveal the rich complexity of black domestic life.
Go Liming, 2022 Oil. Acrylic, Iron Powder And Schlag Metal On Canvas. Image courtesy of Emma Prempeh.
Together with objects, Prempeh often fills her canvases with variegated characters playing out their scenes in living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Go Liming, staged in a home interior signified by the wallpapered background, is steeped in nostalgia. The scene shows a crowd dancing — or “liming”, the art of doing nothing while sharing food, drink, conversation and laughter. In She’s Back a Yard a grandmother figure stands in a room with patterned walls, faux flowers and a table covered in a lace cloth — dressed in a gold and black checkered jersey, hand on hip the image harks back to a different time.
She’s Back a Yard, 2022 Oil, Acrylic, Iron Powder And Schlag Metal On Canvas, 175 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of Emma Prempeh.
All painted in a palette of warm black colours and earth tones — her paintings conjure up the feeling of watching an old-timey film. This is not by chance, the artists used these colours purposefully to evoke the feeling of recollecting and projecting memories. These resurrected recollections of people, events, and places from her past serve to highlight awareness of ancestral time and relationships, selfhood, and evolution. Her work is involved in the process of preserving memories that can only be recalled in fragments.
The theme of evolution or the passage of time is emphasized by the use of Schlage metal, a fusion between copper and zinc that yields a brassy, gold-leaf imitation. Prempeh applies it to selected areas of her often large-scale paintings and, over time, this oxidises, creating slow, live visual changes that animate the image. It becomes a vehicle to narrate and experience the passing of time, memory and its representation.
Emma Prempeh in her studio. Image courtesy of The Ingram Collection.
Together with being rich in meaning, Prempeh is the top trending artist at Frieze New York
2023. Trending in this case referring to Artsy’s monthly series focused on the artists with a
significant growth in followers on the platform from one month to the next.
Graphic by Artsy showing the significant growth in followers of Emma Prempeh
Presenting her first solo booth at the fair Prempeh debuted a suite of new paintings, featuring
light projections and a soundscape, to create an intimate spatial and sensory experience. The
works were shown with Tiwani Contemporary and the booth was considered one of the best of
the fair among hard-hitting names such as Jack Whitten with Hauser & Wirth, Nan Goldin at Gagosian and Kemang Wa Lehulere at Blank & Projectos Ultravioleta. This is no small feat for the young artist who graduated from Goldsmiths University in London in 2019 and is currently pursuing an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Prempeh is certainly an artist to watch — with much attention surrounding the artist there audiences can surely expect more.
Emma Prempeh, installation view in Tiwani Contemporary’s booth at Frieze New York, 2023.
Courtesy of Tiwani Contemporary.